[lbo-talk] Circulation Plunges at Major US Newspapers

[ravi]

At around 1/11/06 11:56 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
>> A friend of mine once claimed that all humour is at the cost of
>> somebody (I gave him a joke that I thought was not so: "1+1=2 even for
>> large values of 1", but he responded that that is a joke about
>> mathematical terminology and therefore mathematicians).
> 
> Wow, you're right. I can't compete with wit like that!
> 

No need to get snarky now! ;-) I didn't offer "1+1=2 ..." as an example
of great wit (the joke's not my invention, btw), but as an example of
something that is funny but does not make fun of someone. I like some of
your humorous posts.


At around 1/11/06 11:30 am, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>> Travis writes:
>>>
>>> But this speaks to why the only format is posssible is electronic with a
>>> more open source structure.  This keeps resource commitments way down in
>>> the zone of practicable.
>> ========================
>> No doubt. But isn't it a cacophony out there, even on the left? How do you
>> make yourself heard above the din? Isn't it still more practicable to
>> contribute as individuals to the already established online left and, where
>> possible, mainstream publications?
>

Yes, there is a a lot of content on the Internet, even on the left, but
does it create a cacophony? My guess is probably not... take for example
my semi-serious blog which I use as a way to bookmark things that I find
interesting (or at times to write HOWTO notes that others might find
useful when they search Google for some problem or other). I have maybe
10 or 20 dedicated readers (I have no idea why these poor souls have
stuck with me), but technorati says I am already ranked 400,000 or some
such among a million or so blogs. The point being that nobody reads this
abundance of content. Blogs like mine are fortunately ignored thanks to
the ranking mechanisms of Google and friends and plain old word-of-mouth
propagation.

Contributing to established sites is a good idea except:

a) They do not seem to meet our criteria whatever they are, or we would
   be reading, enjoying and contributing to them already.

b) They tend to be either irrelevant beyond a very small group of
   faithful, or cliquish and driven by the policies and motives that are
   not much differentiable from the mainstream (ad revenue, the goals of
   the founders, very narrow focus, etc).

It may be better to cross-link or collaborate with such groups. The
premise here is that there is enough headcount and talent within "our"
left to make this possible. We get heard above the din based on that and
the hope that we are not as dull as others, and also by exploiting the
range of skills within our group. You have funny guys, polemical cranks
(and I say that lovingly! please do not flame me!), people with a lot of
great analytical skills and depth of knowledge, web designers, computing
dudes, etc, etc.

In fact, I can argue that it is the cacophony of blogs that necessitates
a collaborative site. I remember reading recently that though there are
a lot of readers of blogs, less than 50% of them use RSS feed readers to
do so... in fact most of them do not even know what such readers are!
What this tells me is that readers are not aggregating their news of
interest (like I do with a feed reader) so that they can create a
virtual single view of all their items of interest. Instead, they use
some older method like bookmarks or just entering the URL to visit each
site, scrolling across pages of entries. At some point the fatigue
arising from this method restricts the number of sites they visit.

Huffington Post is one attempt at doing something similar to what we are
talking about here. They try to cover a wide range of issues, have a
bunch of writers, including big name celebrities, and try to be funny
too. They are ranked on technorati (FWIW) as one of the top 5 or 10 blogs.

	--ravi